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A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

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Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#31

Post by throwawaymaths »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #23
kwhitefoot wrote: post #16

> In addition to potentially rescuing concepts like locality and realism, retrocausal models also open avenues of exploring a “time-symmetric” view of our universe, in which the laws of physics are the same regardless of whether time runs forward or backward. Usually the fundamental laws are regarded as time symmetric already. What does this mean: > Instead, retrocausal models suggest that there is a mechanism that a…

We don’t have a time symmetric model of wave function collapse, to my knowledge. If I’m wrong I’d be super curious to read about it

We don't have a model of wave function collapse at all, iirc.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#32

Post by GravitasFailure »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #21

This idea is present in several Star Trek episodes. The meta question is when did we create those episodes?

I misread your username as a timestamp and was very, very confused for a minute. Very appropriate in this context.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#34

Post by derbOac »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #16

> In addition to potentially rescuing concepts like locality and realism, retrocausal models also open avenues of exploring a “time-symmetric” view of our universe, in which the laws of physics are the same regardless of whether time runs forward or backward. Usually the fundamental laws are regarded as time symmetric already. What does this mean: > Instead, retrocausal models suggest that there is a mechanism that a…

Not an expert in this area at all but there have been some experimental findings in the last five or so years that suggest the possibility of retrocausality.

This is just one example I found but I think there might be another experiment from a few years ago that was getting some attention at the time (although I might be confusing it with a theory paper):

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-29970-6

There are probably better overview articles on retrocausality.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731652-800-quantum-...

https://aeon.co/essays/can-retrocausality-solve-the-puzzle-o...

https://phys.org/news/2017-07-physicists-retrocausal-quantum...

I'd have to read through all these more thoroughly but I wonder if there's some "time locality" property in these models?

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#36

Post by creeble »

while I might buy that the past is strongly influenced by the present (“facts” change over time), I don’t think we have much of a model for the future to say much of anything about how it influences the past.

Or, I guess the point is, maybe it’s the same thing.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#37

Post by marcus_holmes »

Interesting because it messes with the school of thought that everything is determined already and we're just following a sequence of actions that arise from the starting conditions of the universe. If causality is broken then maybe we have free will?

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#38

Post by paulusthe »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #37

Interesting because it messes with the school of thought that everything is determined already and we're just following a sequence of actions that arise from the starting conditions of the universe. If causality is broken then maybe we have free will?

That's a very lazy school of thought though. It's just atheistic Calvinism, a tautology masquerading as a "philosophy".

Calvin believed in pre-destination (your fate and every decision you make is decided before you exist) on the grounds that, because God exists and is omnipotent, what you are doing must therefore be what God wants to happen, both good and bad. After all, God is omnipotent, so there you go.

Today's Calvinists just replace God-driven destiny with nature-driven destiny, but the underlying tautology (X exists, therefore X was always destined to exist, as proven by the fact that it exists at all) remains the same. In fact, it's an arguably more ignorant version of Calvinism, because it requires that one completely dismisses any knowledge they have of probability theory. So it's the "smarter" Calvinism that requires you be ignorant of 20th century mathematical advances.

Hate that crap. The only people I hear talking about it are silicon valley utopians, which is probably the other reason I hate it.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#39

Post by mistermann »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #10
karpierz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the factual past? It's the extrapolation of models that we've created in the present, but those models are only our best guess at the truth. They may be revised in the future or simply not hold for the past.

What? No. The factual past is what actually happened. Don't mistake the map for the territory.

Can you point us to The Territory please? You see it, I presume?
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